headsup: the blog

Saturday, December 31, 2016

The black guy's about to not play golf again!

You really do wonder if the Times has a policy of letting the print edition look all mature -- if incomprehensibly boring, headline-wise -- while saving the cask-strength stuff for online readers:

That explains why Trump is in the 1A print headline but doesn't appear anywhere in the frontpage text -- this is a story about an "Obama snub." Of what, you ask?

Of all the perks of the presidency that Barack Obama will miss as he leaves the White House, it’s a good bet that Camp David won’t rank high on the list.

Compared with his predecessors, President Obama has spent little downtime over the past eight years at the secluded presidential retreat in the mountains overlooking Thurmont, Maryland. In total, Mr. Obama has visited Camp David 39 times, spanning all or parts of 93 days — barely 3 percent of his two-term tenure.

By contrast, President George W. Bush made 149 visits to Camp David in two terms, covering all or parts of 487 days, said Mark Knoller, the CBS News White House reporter who keeps meticulous records of presidential comings and goings.In other words, this is more or less the same story that the same reporter wrote in May 2014:President Obama differs from his predecessor on more than just policy.

Compared with President George W. Bush, Mr. Obama has rarely visited Camp David, the sprawling, secluded retreat in northern Maryland that has become a regular getaway spot for presidents over the past 70 years.Read more »

Friday, December 30, 2016

What difference, at this point, does it make?

As you regular readers can imagine, it's been a trying day over at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network. Fortunately, the Orange Peril has finally told his servants how to think about the day's news:

President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday “it’s time for our country
to move on to bigger and better things” after the Obama administration
issued sanctions against Russia for its alleged 2016 election hacking.

“It's time for our country to move on to bigger and
better things,” Trump said in a written response released four hours
after the announcement. “Nevertheless, in the interest of our country
and its great people, I will meet with leaders of the intelligence
community next week in order to be updated on the facts of this
situation."

He told reporters that Israel is being treated "very, very unfairly,"
maintaining that countries that are "horrible places" never get
reprimanded. He refused to directly answer a question about whether
Israel should stop building settlements, saying he is "very, very strong
on Israel."

He dodged a direct response when asked about
accusations that Russia hacked the U.S. election, saying computers have
"complicated lives very greatly."

"We don't have the kind of security we need," Trump
said, adding, "Nobody knows what's going on." He said he believes "we
have to get on with our lives."

Imagine the fun if anyone at Fox had dared to suggest, for example, that some other political elite's comments needed to be understood in a larger context -- for example, BENGHAZI!!!!!!!!!

SENATOR JOHNSON: Again, again we were mislead that there were supposedly protests and something then sprang out of that, an assault sprang out of that, and that was easily ascertained that that was not the fact, and the American people could've known that within days and they didn't know that.

HILLARY CLINTON: With all due respect, the fact is we had 4 dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.Not to flog the old dead horse too often, but if Senator Johnson was "misled that there were supposedly protests," it's probably because he watched a little too much Fox News himself:

In "context," any grownup first-language speaker of English might think, the former secretary of State has a point: whichever of several concurrent events might have turned the Benghazi case into the debacle it was, we need to suck it up and figure out how to keep it from happening again. Imagine if she had said it was time "to move on to bigger and better things." Or, if your imagination is wanting, look at how Fox covered the reasonably sensible statements she did make.If you want to have a Christmas truce, fine. (It's been a long year, so enjoy John McCutcheon's version.) I have a reasonable store of Christmas beers left and will happily pour one for any Fox journalist who stumbles out of the trenches toward the happy noise. But the folks who lie for a living need to know that there's going to be an accounting after we put the flagons away.* Yes, if you are among the multitudes who apparently thought the Orange Peril would lead the rebellion of The People against The Elites, well ... cha-ching!

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Or maybe not

SENEY NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE -- Maybe Bigfoot did this. Maybe.... A
tall, thin sapling had been bent into an arch over the path, high above
everyone’s heads. Its tip was wedged in the underbrush, holding it down.

After a brief detour into "Bigfoot stick language" (no, really), we get to the why-we're-here:It's been a busy year for the group. Bigfoot has been all over the
news. First, there was a sighting in May of a possible Bigfoot seen on a
camera mounted above an eagle’s nest in a tree in Beulah, near the
Platte River State Fish Hatchery in the northern Lower Peninsula. It
made news all over the world.Then there was the photo of a Bigfoot-looking something, taken by a
trail cam mounted on a tree in the western Upper Peninsula this fall, as
the mystery creature was combing through a campsite.Yes. We know this because some news organizations can't seem to stop covering Bigfoot sightings. It's probably a little kinder to say that every news organization has some particularly beloved fiction that it can't help but pass as news, and that almost every news organization falls for a Bigfoot or Nessie story sometime. It's not the sort of "fake news" that has gotten all the heat the past few months, but it does have some indirect effects in common with that more popular brand. What you print tells your audience a lot about what you believe -- even if what you believe is "hey, everybody loves a Bigfoot story." Nobody's hurt by a little Santa Claus on the front page around Christmastide, until you mistakenly elect the guy who's in charge of the naughty-nice list.

Saturday, December 24, 2016

Puppies, kittens, birthday cake!

There's good news in our top story tonight, Mr. and Mrs. America!President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday that he will dissolve his
philanthropic foundation to avoid “even the appearance” of a conflict of
interest, as he prepares to take over the White House next month.

The plan to shutter the Donald J. Trump Foundation
was not unexpected, amid continuing criticism that Trump’s international
real estate holdings and other business ventures will present for him
as president potential conflicts of interest.

“The foundation has done enormous good works over the
years in contributing millions of dollars to countless worthy groups,
including supporting veterans, law enforcement officers and children,”
Trump said in a statement released by his presidential transition
office. “However, to avoid even the appearance of any conflict with
my role as president, I have decided to continue to pursue my strong
interest in philanthropy in other ways.”

The statement also said that Trump has asked his
legal team to start dissolving the foundation, which he said operated
for decades at essentially no cost and funneled 100 percent of the money
to charity.

When you can't tell what a Fox-bylined story is trying to do, it's always a good idea to check the reader comments. Weird thing, though: Comments don't seem to be enabled for this story. Why do you suppose that might be?

The black guy's playing golf again!

Give us the good news first, The Washington Times!For the last time, taxpayers are paying for a Hawaiian Christmas
vacation for President Obama and his family, an annual luxury getaway
that has cost the Treasury easily more than $35 million over eight
years.

Golfing on oceanside courses, dining at high-end
restaurants and frolicking on stunning white-sand beaches where security
guards keep other tourists at bay, the president and his family are in
the midst of a 17-day holiday that requires dozens of Secret Service
agents, military personnel and other government employees to guarantee
their safety and ease of travel around Oahu.

The Obamas are once
again renting a multimillion-dollar oceanfront home in Kailua, a town on
the northeast side of the island where houses in the neighborhood fetch
around $10 million. It’s near golf courses and a Marine Corps base
where the president goes for morning workouts at the gym.Well, that can't be fake news. It has verbs and objects and adjectives, and -- Christmas comes early! -- lots of things that look like actual facts. Still, it has a couple of features that help the larger project of distinguishing the People's Right to Know from the People's Right to ... best two out of three? We were so close that time.Read more »

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Awwwwwww

How did "snub" become the Headline Word of the Day among the thin-skinned denizens of Planet Fox? Let's see!Getting singers for Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20th is turning out to be harder than it was to fill his Cabinet.

The only confirmed talent so far are 16-year-old
"America’s Got Talent" 2010 runner-up Jackie Evancho, the Mormon
Tabernacle Choir, and the Rockettes.

Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway insisted to ABC
News there will be more singers, but refused to name them. Many
performers -- some who have been asked, others who have not -- have
already taken a pass. Considering that Sir Elton's views on the topic were known a month ago, it's hard to see a lot of news value in this revelation. Maybe the commenters will help shed some light:Just play videos of liberal melt downs I could watch that all night.Of course he can't find an entertainer because most of them are liberals that suck anyway. Hollywood sucks the big one.

We need to get people to be responsible in the inner cities and we need to end gangs and welfare babies. At this point since no one wants top cooperate, it may mean a few hundred thousand will starve. hopefully other countries will take them in.

This is a nothing story. There is plenty of bands or top end talent that back GOP people. Right now, the Media is trying to promote the idea that Hollywood can snub Trump on his big day. In the end, it will be proven false and this story being what it is. Crap space filler.

I LOVE watching liberals throw tantrums and host pity parties! I LOVE seeing the river of crocodile tears streaming down their cheeks! I LOVE the look of PRETEND DISPARE AND FALSE INDIGNATION because their CROOKED candidate LOST the election! I LOVE their DESPERATE attempts to change the results of the election by intimidating Electors! But MOST OF ALL, I LOVE THE FACT THEY LOST AND Donald Trump IS PRESIDENT!!!

Progs, Hollywood, the entertainment industry and the MSM are about to have a teachable moment (4-8 years). This will be fun. They'll have to recalibrate their approach.

The Main Stream Media also said there was no way Trump could win this election. This is just more MSM fake news.

You don't see Obama or Hillary doing the right thing and telling the 'resistance' to back off and accept the loss. I believe they are clinging to their puppies and crack pipes.

Fake news by omission

Three guesses on where in the newsosphere the morning's third most important story began!

Dammit, you peeked.

Fox is sticking with best practices for a career in, say, armed robbery or terrorism: follow the routines to reduce the risk of being noticed. Here, the routine is to spin the story forward -- "forward spin," unlike "Spin Alley," is a valence-neutral term of practice -- by adding context, reaction or interpretation. Going to Twitter, in this case, is no different from finding a Concerned Passerby to say "grinch" after someone robs the Salvation Army kettle. Here's the Fox tale in its entirety, credited to Heat Street (again):Prior to the 2012 presidential election, the Washington, D.C., Metro system began preparing special commemorative “SmartTrip” cards for Inauguration Day featuring both major candidates.

President Obama would go on to win reelection that
year, but the Metro also designed a fancy Mitt Romney-themed SmartTrip
card for the special occasion, just in case.

It looks like the D.C. Metro has gone to considerably
less effort to prepare for Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
Here is the design for this year’s commemorative Inauguration Day
SmartTrip card:

The word “Trump” is nowhere to be found. Trump himself does not appear
on the card. Twitters users were quick to point out what they saw as an
obvious snub.

And that's that. (Though you can click through to the Heat Street original for a better sense of Fox's editing skills and Heat Street's awesome news judgment.) Conveniently, we've forward-spun right past that pesky WTOP story that Drudge was forced to link to, because WTOP -- hang on, kids -- actually committed some "reporting":In an emailed statement to WTOP, Metro said it requested permission to
use a photo of Trump but didn’t receive a reply from his campaign. “Due
to the long lead time to produce the cards, the new pass commemorates
the national celebration of the 58th Presidential Inauguration,” the
agency stated.

In other words, it looks like Trump snubbed Metro, not the other way 'round. But that's not going to give the audience the right impression of the liberal establishment's perfidy, is it?

Can you call "fake news" on a story in which all the facts are true? (I mean, it's not Fox's fault that the hed doesn't say who snubwayed whom.) Reply hazy, ask again later. But by way of distinguishing Fox from the adults in the room, you can certainly call it fake journalism.

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Drudge's lips to God's ear

Whether any particular bit of "fake news" is true or false -- and let's go ahead and stipulate that everything in this Tuesday morning screenshot is at least technically not false -- doesn't matter if the story doesn't spread. Mapping how bullshit moves from the fringe to the mainstream is thus central to the de-bullshitting process."Blood on her hands!" isn't any more or less evaluative than a hed that attributes the local sportsball team's win or loss to a particular play or player. The difference is that the game here is more opaque: we didn't see it, so we have to take someone's word for it. And whose word?

GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing a backlash after 12 people were killed when an attacker ploughed through innocent revellers at a Christmas market in a truck.

The country’s far-right leaders have blasted the chancellor’s “open-door” immigration policy for sparking the attack in Berlin – and even her own party is putting the boot in.

“These are Merkel’s dead,” Marcus Pretzell, chairman of the Alternative for Germany party in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, posted on Twitter.

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Rope-a-dope

If you hadn't been in such a hurry to recycle the strikingly unoriginal "Roped by Cowboys," you might have looked down the page and seen "New York 17, Detroit 6." And thus is another outpost lost in the War on Editing.

Were things better in the Big Town (aside from correctly identifying the opposing team)? Not unless you didn't have enough "Giant [noun]" in your life:

Bonus points to the Freep for this metaphor from Mars:

You knew Odell Beckham Jr. was lurking, a bat in the belfry, a quick
bite that could come at any time. But when the Detroit Lions’ best
defense against him, cornerback Darius Slay, went out early with a
hamstring injury, you could almost hear Beckham cooing, “Here I come,
here I come …"As the New Yorker used to put it in column fillers: Coos we doubt ever got cooed.

For the past eight years, President Barack Obama and his allies in Congress have feverishly worked to centralize energy regulatory power in Washington, empowering federal bureaucrats to micromanage how energy producers operate their facilities and run their businesses.

... But starting in January 2017, we can begin to move all that decision-making power closer to the people.

The incoming Congress and new administration give us the best opportunity in recent memory to put Washington—especially federal energy policy—back on the side of hardworking Americans.

This isn't technically "fake news" (for which we're still awaiting a definition); it's a commentary, and as we all learned in J-school or somewhere, opinions aren't statements of fact. But it does point to some of the important changes in the news ecosystem that help bait-and-switch journalism work the way it does. Pretty much anybody can have a reasonably professional-looking websiteand a mailing list. Heritage looks respectable, because it's been around a long time and has a lot of money, but that doesn't mean all its fact claims are valid (or that its opinions are anything you couldn't get for free at a bar). A lot of the newcomers -- Heat Street, which is sort of like Todd Starnes without the bless-your-heart pop-Southernism, and EAGNews,which specializes in making up stories about how Michelle Obama is coming after your poppets' school lunches, to name two-- also pump stuff into the news stream just upriver from where Fox and folks like Fox draw their news supply.* The fact barrier is a lot lower when something has already been reported, because being reported creates a fact -- THIS JUST IN! -- by itself.

For lots of good and deeply embedded reasons, news isn't subject to gummint regulation, but the traditional model had a lot of built-in skepticism that worked fairly well much of the time to keep the product reasonably safe. Not everything you see from the new apostles of free speech is toxic, but even if you read the label carefully, you don't entirely know what mix of tormented fact, outright fiction and teabilly paranoia you're ingesting.

Dressing up your illustrations with tiny nuclear plants all aglow, on the other hand, is just fun.

* Needless to say, this problem is not limited to the partisan press. Judicial Watch, the self-anointed watchdog group that never tired of fanning the Clinton email flames, can also make McClatchy jump by releasing an "analysis" of Obama's vacation spending.

Fake news: Holy Roman Empire

Let's check in on Sunday morning's top story at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network:Everyone likes a good story. And that’s precisely why the “fake news” parade
catapulted to the fore in this year’s election cycle.

Actually, no. To the extent that some "'fake news' parade" was "catapulted to the fore," it was (a) after the fact and (b) unrelated to any purported love for "a good story," unless Fox thinks its viewers are even stupider than they've so far shown themselves to be.

So, let’s get in on some “fake news” about the next election cycle, as well.

The fake news phenomenon recently visited the U.S. Capitol. And not quite in the way you might think.

Freeze the tape for a second. The biggest problem with "fake news" in the month and change since the November election is that no one knows what the term means. Fox and the farther outliers on the right-wing media spectrum are desperately concerned that Facebook will use its evil algorithms to suppress the TRVTH:

That probably means something other than suppressing the dude in Minsk who's making up clickbait in his bedroom. It might include -- oh, the president-elect and a talk-radio host discussing Obama's plot to murder Justice Scalia, though that story didn't seem to have been catapulted to the front of anything during the election season. You can see Fox's interest in drawing "the left" into the mix; as long as you can play the tu quoque card, your crusade against the algorithms is a selfless bit of journalism in the public service.

The problem, though, is that nothing in the hed is true. The recounting of Biden's "unofficial WH bid" is neither fake, nor news, nor "from the left." No details of the story appear to have been fabricated (and Fox does know how to make things up). As "news" goes, even in the right-wing media, the story faded out a week ago. And had there been any fiction, or any news, none of it seems to have come from anything farther left than Fox itself.Read more »

Friday, December 16, 2016

Making America white again

How are the drooler media making America white great again today? Let's follow a Drudge link to the Daily Caller:

Six Hispanic surnames were among the top 15 common last names in 2010,
according to figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau Thursday.

According to the 2010 Census, the top 15 most popular last names in 2010
were as follows: Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Garcia,
Miller, Davis, Rodriguez, Martinez, Hernandez, Lopez, Gonzalez, Wilson
and Anderson. There were no Hispanic names among the top 15 most common
surnames in the 1990 Census.

Can it get worse?

The Census Bureau also released the last names with the largest increase
in frequency of use from 2000 to 2010. These are in descending order:
Zhang, Li, Ali, Liu, Khan, Vazquez, Wang, Huang, Lin, Singh, Chen,
Bautista, Velazquez, Patel, and Wu.

In
no way, of course, is this "fake news." Not only are the numbers real,
they're official! Like celebrity news, this is more like carbon
monoxide; it crowds real news out and inhibits it from getting to the
vital organs. The brain, like the front page, has a limited carrying
capacity.On its sleazier side, it's also a cousin of the evergreen baby names story.
I mean, with the War On Christmas decorations up, what better time to
restock the survival bunker with freeze-dried food and ammunition? Not only are Rodriguez and Martinez here, but Zhang, Ali and
KHAN!!!!!!!!!! aren't far behind.

That's
how framing works. Framing isn't about whether the news is real or
fake; it's about the context in which the asserted facts make sense.
When every story you see is about the world slipping through your
(white) fingers, things don't have to be false for you to blame the
Kenyan usurper.

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

The death of irony

You can tell why this is the No. 3 story at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network this evening. It's got everything: anti-Trump bias, happy ending and Muslims Behaving Badly!New York City college student Yasmin al-Scaryname who claimed to be the
victim of a hate crime by Trump supporters is under arrest and charged
with filing a false report, a police source told The New York Daily News.

The 18-year-old al-Scaryname caused quite the media stir
with her sensationalized account of Trump supporters attacking her on
the subway. She claimed three men attempted to pull off her hijab while
calling her a terrorist and yelling Trump’s name. All this happened, she
said, while New Yorkers sat idly by and watched her get assaulted.

Fun fact of journalism: You can tell more about news practice from how the rules are broken* than from how the rules are followed. "Don't convict 'em in the hed" is a powerful and universally followed rule, because breaking it can have practical consequences as well as ethical ones. If you declare the suspect Guilty Guilty Guilty on Monday and charges are Dropped Dropped Dropped on Thursday, you have some explaining to do if the erstwhile suspect demands to know why your professional negligence allowed a false and defamatory statement onto the front page. Breaking the rule is a calculated risk.The ethics part, as usual, is more entertaining. Declaring yourself Fair 'n' Balanced means your starting position is not to take sides: Innocent until proven guilty, let's hear both sides, and no matter how loud the crowd gets, the headline is Smallville Loses Heartbreaker, not Blind Ump Costs Our Town Title. You only get to break that rule when there's a higher good to be served.Stop the tape for a moment to give credit to Heat Street, one of the many parajournalistic sites that provide the sort of content Fox doesn't have the time or attention span to write on its own. Although the entertaining syntax may belong to someone else, the moral conclusion in the hed is Fox's:

The many media outlet’s initial reporting of the fake hate crime did not
include qualifiers like “alleged” and “claimed.” Instead they reported
the hoax crime as a fact like with Buzzfeed’s story, “Drunk Men Yelling
“Donald Trump” Attempt To Remove Woman’s Hijab On NYC Subway.”

OMG Buzzfeed left the attribution out of a headline! Does the Pulitzer committee know about this?* That's "broken," as opposed to "didn't get the memo about 'Christmas came early' and the last copy editor was furloughed after Thanksgiving." If
you want to chart the structure of power in the newsroom, look for
stories in which the subjects are known by first name, rather than
family name, on second reference; that writer usually outranks most of the editors.

A million here, a million there ...

An article
on Tuesday about the proportion of American adults who have taken a
psychiatric drug misstated the number of adults involved in a 2013
prescription drug survey done by the government. It was 37,421, not 242
million.We should all hope for response rates like that.

Thursday, December 08, 2016

Nonelongated creamy orb

A cheese ball is the culinary equivalent of a Rorschach test. How you
regard the creamy orb depends very much on where you were raised, how
you were raised and — especially when facing one of the lesser examples —
your emotional fortitude.

Getting an elongated yellow fruit into the lede takes some writering, doesn't it?

Monday, December 05, 2016

Two editors walk into a bar

So if two copy editors walk into a restaurant and see some dude waving a gun and proclaiming that he's there to investigate a made-up story about the Clinton campaign, they should:

a) Duckb) Report that the dude is investigating the fake newsc) Try the calamari! Thanks, I'll be here all week.

In the good old days, we could have had (d), avoid the assumption that self-proclaimed investigators hewing to a paranoid style of political discourse are actually doing the things they claim to be doing, particularly when it's going at the top of the front page. The naked guy waving a chainsaw to keep the invisible ammonia beings of Planet Mxyzptlk at bay doesn't get a hed proclaiming MAN FENDING OFF SPACE CREATURES HAS N.C. LINKS.

One would like to think this doesn't need explaining, but perhaps we need to start at the beginning with some stuff. And don't forget your server, folks.

Saturday, December 03, 2016

Second front

The right-wing news site Breitbart has declared “#WAR” on Kellogg’s, calling for a boycott of the cereal company’s products after they decided to cease advertising on the site.

... In response to Kellogg’s statement, Breitbart published a furious attack on the cereal company on Wednesday saying that the move represents “an escalation in the war by leftist companies ... against conservative customers”. Editor-in-chief Alexander Marlow called for a boycott of the company’s products, saying: “For Kellogg’s, an American brand, to blacklist Breitbart News in order to placate left-wing totalitarians is a disgraceful act of cowardice.”

How about two cops in a rowboat?

Well, that's a relief. Let's have a big-picture lede to set the stage before we start counting, and don't forget to mention those colleges and their safe spaces!

Since President-elect Donald Trump's victory, people have taken to
social media with concerns and fears about the incoming administration.
Riots, protests and the creation of safe spaces on college campuses have
rose* in the wake of an election that has left the country deeply
divided.

But Ali Olaikhan, a Muslim-American, argues Trump's comments were taken out of context.

So we're at one -- at least, one who (according to Fox) thinks some unspecified comments were taken out of context.

“I'm a Muslim, and I know what he says about Muslims,” said Olaikhan.
“I understand what he means. He's talking about the terrorists or the
extremists, of course."

Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business — that- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

But back to the latest demonstration of affection for the Dear Leader!Read more »